February 11th, 2011 |
5:19 AM

It's Poetry Friday! First off I'd like to point you to This week's Poetry Push poems where readers have shared their poetic response to a Poetry Push prompt for a list poem. I've decided to point to the original link for Poetry Friday, rather than repost the poems here because that way people can respond to any of the individual poems that might speak to them.

I started to panic when I realized that it was Poetry Friday because I've been flat out on the couch with the flu all week with my husband stuck taking care of me and the dog and the house and still going to work each day. So with Valentine's Day around the corner, and the knowledge that I have one the best husbands ever, I decided to write a love poem for him.

IT'S EASY FOR HIM

It's easy for him to say I love you on the good days, days when I've decluttered the house,caught up on the laundry and finally changed the sheets on the bed.

It's easy for him to say I love you on the pretty days,when I dress up just a little,days I let mascara wake up my tired eyesand my clean hair falls to my waistlike strands of sunshine.

It's easy to love when life is beautiful.Not so easy(or so I thought)to say I love you on the down days,the not feeling like myself and I'm getting sick days.

But he notices something about me and asks are you okay?I shake my head no and he holds my hair away from my face,and I lean over the bucketwhile my stomach rebels.

I camp on the couch and he brings me clear liquidsand soda crackers and makes sure the remote control and the phone are close at hand when he has to leave.

He comes home carrying every comfort foodhe can remember I've ever mentioned,alternates his day between letting me napand bringing me more foods to tempt my lack of appetite.

He keeps the house running quietly in the backgroundwhile I do battle with the flu,rubs my back,tucks the comforter up under my chin,blows me a kiss good night,and oh, all the ways he tells me he loves methe good days and the bad dayshe loves meit's so easy for him.

Who am I?I was born on the Cancer/Leo cusp and share a birthday with Ernest Hemingway and Robin Williams. The similarities don't stop there as I can go from depressed to ecstatic without ever passing go. I feel scared most of the time though my friends call me brave and I find it easier to believe in my friends than to believe in my own abilities to make what I want out of my life.

Who am I? A wife, a mother, a daughter, and even, gulp, a grandmother.

Who am I? A writer who never gets tired of playing with words, even when the words are hard to find. A writer of books for children and articles for grown-ups and many things in-between.

"Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing. They are the ones who discover what is most important and strangest and most pleasurable in themselves, and keep believing in the value of their work, despite the difficulties."
--Bonnie Friedman

"As writers, we must be willing to feel our sadness, our anger, our terror, so we can reach in and find our sweet vulnerability that is just sitting there waiting for us to come back home."
--Nancy Slonim Aronie

"Writers write about what obsesses them. You draw those cards. I lost my mother when I was 14. My daughter died at the age of 6. I lost my faith as a Catholic. When I'm writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is."
--Anne Rice